Peace and Conflict
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Speech in Washington, D.C.
We have not been getting the truth about America to the world, particularly to the young intellectuals in the foreign nations, and particularly in those countries which are just growing, which have just come onto the world scene. Meanwhile, Communism, armed not with truth but with intensive, attractive propaganda, has been turning them against us.
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Address at the Sixth Annual Westside Community Conference, Columbia University, New York City
Ever since the onset of the Cold War, we have been urged to “develop” a concise, exacting American manifesto— a platform which would compete with the simple, rousing calls of the Communists.
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Speech
Over the years, an understanding of what America really stands for is going to count far more than missiles, aircraft carriers and supersonic bombers. The big changes of the future will result from this understanding or lack of it.
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Speech at Indiana University Medical School
Let me say something about the tenor of that question and some of the other questions. There are people in this country who suffer. I look around this room and I don’t see many black faces who are going to be doctors
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Adolfo Pérez Esquivel
Pérez Esquivel was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1931. Despite family poverty, he attended school and trained as an architect and sculptor—his large-scale murals and other work reflect his faith in humankind and foundational belief in God. He was also a professor of architecture for 25 years. But he worried about human rights abuses…
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Betty Williams
Betty Williams didn’t start off as an activist. She was a Protestant office receptionist from West Belfast. In 1976, she witnessed a horrific tragedy in which three innocent children were killed by the swerving car of an Irish Republican Army gunman. The shock motivated her to launch an appeal against the meaningless use of violence…
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Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo
A Roman Catholic bishop, Belo played a vital and ongoing role in bringing peace to his country, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, during the Indonesian occupation that stretched from 1975 to 1999. He was born in 1948 in Wailakama, a small, rural village in East Timor, where he grew up in a farming family and…
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Mohamed ElBaradei
Mohamed ElBaradei was born in Cairo in 1942. His father was an attorney who headed the Egyptian Bar Association and supported democratic rights, including a free press and an independent judiciary. Following in those footsteps, Mohamed studied law in Egypt before earning his doctorate in international law at the New York University School of Law…
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Shimon Peres
Shimon Peres was born in Poland in 1923. To escape the persecution of Jews there, the family fled to Palestine in 1934—relatives who remained in Poland were killed during World War II. Peres grew up in Tel Aviv and studied agricultural science. He spent several years in Kibbutz Geva and Kibbutz Alumot and was elected…
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Kek Galabru
Born on October 4, 1942, Kek Galabru received her medical degree in France in 1968. She practiced medicine and conducted research in Phnom Penh from 1968 to 1971, and continued her work in Canada, Brazil, and Angola. In 1987–88 Galabru played a key role in opening negotiations between Hun Sen, president of the Cambodian Council…
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José Ramos-Horta
Jose Ramos-Horta is famous for his uncompromising and indefatigable work on behalf of the people of East Timor, who were brutally invaded by Indonesia In 1975. Muslim West Timor became part of Indonesia In 1946, while East Timor, settled In 1520 by the Portuguese with a different language, religion, and customs, remained a colony until…
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Jody Williams
Jody Williams has dedicated her life to achieving a global ban on antipersonnel landmines, which still claim thousands of innocent lives every year. In 1992, she launched the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), to end the production, trade, use and stockpiling of landmines, a weapon that has been in existence since the U.S. Civil…
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